It's now 2012 and the netbook market has evolved into ultrabooks. Ultrabooks use full speed notebook components, but keep the ultra-thin design first found on netbooks. In order for ultrabooks to take shape, 9mm HDDs had to go, enter mSATA.

mSATA and the close variants are slated to make a grand entrance this year and not just in ultrabooks. At CES, four out of five next generation GIGABYTE desktop motherboards on display using the Ivy Bridge chipset sported mSATA slots. Intel's Smart Response Technology and NVELO's Dataplex software layer, also commonly referred to as SSD Cache can both quickly turn a small mSATA drive into instant IOPS performance beast while still offering the capacity of your large data capacity HDD.